Generation Y Was Never Meant For Online Dating

Shani Silver
10 min readMay 23, 2023
High School Senior Photo. Note the Rum Raisin lip color, please.

I am Generation Y. Do not millennial me unless you’d like a kick in the teeth. I get that we’re ambiguous. Too young to be Gen X, too old to be Millennials. One article* found on The Atlantic can even be quoted as saying, “Generation Y is a fake, made-up thing. Do not worry about it.” Dicks.

I am generation Y. I was born in 1982 and if you need a unifying identifier that gathers us in unbreakable, non-millennial stature, here it is: We remember being teenagers without the internet, and we remember being teenagers, with it. We’re it, the cusp. The crest of the wave. The forgotten, early 80s-born, un-entitled children of technology’s greatest crossover.

We remember when MTV’s “The Real World” had purpose, when it respected itself. To us, Wayne’s World is more movie than SNL sketch. We recorded Pearl Jam onto cassette tapes when they came on the radio. We listened to the radio.

But we were not single in the 90s.

We were just kids. Most of our sexually formative years involved in-person activity, but don’t think we weren’t on the front lines of the first chatrooms in existence dabbling in what you now call sexting. There was no Tinder in the 90s. No smartphones, no face swiping apps allowing us to thumb through pictures of human beings like shirts on a clothing rack at Marshall’s. If you were…

--

--